Blog A Hatchlings Journey

In this beginner-blog I like to report about the progress on my seraphon models.

Because I have very little experience in the field of painting minis and the last time I painted ia somewhat over ten years ago, I consider myself an absolute beginner and would gladly hear about your suggestions and tips. All those techniques and considerations seem quite daunting to me.

I bought the starter set and made some conversions, so I got an additional skink priest, a scar veteran on cold-one, an astrolith bearer and a old-one on foot. I will repost the pictures I already posted in my introduction thread:

At this point, I only assembled and primed all my minis. Yesterday I started with making some experiments with my colours. For the skin of my lizards I aim for a little more greenish tone than the typical gw colour-scheme. You can see the result of my experiments below.

I really like how some of the colours turned out.

Right now I consider taking A4 as Base for Skin, then wash with a deluted A1, and then put layer C4 on it. Maybe highlight or drybrush with a bit of more white into C4.

For the scales, I think about taking A2 as Base, A1 as wash, and then maybe B6 as layer?

The lizards should also receive a warpaint in a dark red/bordeaux.

Weapons with bronze and gold edge-highlight.

Shields and Blades of the Weapons with dark grey and then I would try something like a galaxy effect. Or I highlight with a light emerald green like E2 but with more white put into the mix.

What do you guys think about the whole colour concept?
I am eager for your feedback and suggestions.

As said before, I am a little lost and paralyzed by all the techniques and possible combinations of colours.
And I dont want my seraphon to look as horrible as my lord of the rings miniatures I painted as a teenager

And would you recommend buying special washes or inks? Because I was planning on making my own washes simply by deluding a single colour with water to the point it is very very liquid.
Or is this method not recommended?

And thanks for the planner. Good pre-planning tool. Too bad that you can't create wash and layer effects.

You can create washes like that, but to be honest I think just using inks is a better idea, for more consistent results.

As for your other question:
A wash should normally fit the base color to some degree. There are ones that just darken (shades, like bronw and black) and some that tint (blue, purple, red and so on.)
My most often used ones are
- sepia
- brown
- black
- blue
- purple
- red
- green

Actually, this was done on purpose. When I experimented with my bits, I also got the impression of snake dreadlocks. But my friends argue with me, that it doesn't look like dreads. Glad you back my point

I have the citadel app but I either don't know how to use it properly or it is pretty useless. There is only one saurus and only one color scheme.

About the medium, do you mean the lahmian medium? Maybe it is better just to buy an ink directly? How important is the color of the ink? Does it have to match perfectly?

Click to expand...

It's irrelevant that the app only has one Saurus you can adapt the schemes of any model to fit your army, the app should give you a guide on what colours to use, just look up gold and it will give you loads of options and then it will show you what colours to use.

Lahmian medium is correct, the colour does not need to match, if your buying shades don't go full hog and get them all just get Agrax earthshade, Seraphim sepia and Nuln oil for now.

So last night, I finally got to paint my first miniature. It's my testing dummie. I chose a saurus warrior, because with this guys I don't care as much about messing up.

It is not finished yet. I only put base color and shade on it. Next thing will be layer and then highlights. Take a look at the results.

I am not happy with the result. Right now it looks more or less exactly like the games Workshop standard scheme. The base colors came out very bright and light. I was aiming for the colors A2 and A4 (from my post above). On paper, the colors come out quite dark but on the miniature it got very bright. Maybe I should have mixed some black into.

Also, the result is more blue-ish than I wanted.

For the layer, I definitely want to go into a more greenish direction but without getting much lighter. But now I am scared of mixing the layer color.

Just go on and try stuff, don't be scared.
Models seldom turn out the way you want them to, at least in the beginning. That's perfectly normal. I have been doing this for a bit more than a year now, and painted almost 300 models, and there are very few (like, ten or so) that ended up looking exactly as planned.

We should probably have warned you, those colors are not meant for paper and will not look the same on paper as on a model.
I recommend using empty sprues for color tests since those are made of the same material.

I think you could try drybrushing the war paint parts with a bright red. Use a small drybrush so you don't get the red on the other parts.
Looks pretty good though, with just a few adjustments and practice you will have a cool looking Saurus unit to play with.